A tiny middle school tucked into the Yampa valley ditched its decades-old coal-fired boilers for a wood-pellet furnace, partly because of a beetle not much bigger than an eyelash.
Mountain pine beetles have ravaged wide swaths of trees in Colorado, leaving the surviving forest more susceptible to fire from decaying trees.
A handful of businesses are trying to capitalize on a bad situation and, in the process, they may prevent it from getting worse.
Sorocco Middle School contacted one of the two wood-pellet plants in Colorado that have opened since the beetles began attacking trees a number of years ago, and it now draws heat from pellets.
“It’s a disturbing situation to watch all of our trees die, and we know this is going to dramatically impact our landscape,” said Mark Mathis, president and chief executive of Confluence Energy, a pellet producer about 100 miles northwest of Denver.
In Colorado, beetles had infected at least 1.5 million acres of forest as of 2007, creating vast tracts of dying red and gray forest.
The predominant use for beetle-killed trees is still housing lumber, but the downturn in real estate has piqued interest in harvesting more dead trees for fuel, said John Swaan, executive director of the Wood Pellet Association of Canada.
